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Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

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Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#161

Post by Symbiote »

toyg wrote: post #160
taneq wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gofer_%28programming_language%... , the neutered Haskell clone. Don't get me wrong, I certainly think that functional programming has its place in the world, but as a first year uni student all fired up about finally learning "real" programming after years of teaching myself (back before the internet laid everything out on a platter), I was not impressed.

Eh, same with me and Scheme. I don't think functional paradigms can really be appreciated by 1st/2nd year undergrads. At that age you are fundamentally impatient to make your mark in a practical sense, your approach will be instinctively imperative. You have to hit the wall (scaling / parallelism / thread management / complexity etc) before you start to really appreciate the upsides of functional paradigms. Unfortuna…

> your approach will be instinctively imperative

Not necessarily (based on being an assistant in lab sessions for first year students learning Haskell).

But what it did do was put everyone on the same level, including the arrogant students who "already knew how to code" and hadn't listened (or attended) the lectures.

I think they chose a functional language to start with good habits for thinking about what to implement, not how to implement it. If you don't know what the problem is, you should work on that, rather than bashing out some Java...

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#162

Post by toyg »

cbd1984 wrote: post #120
toyg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In t…

The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts. > you will always have [...] > memory, storage First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some system…

> we've already seen home system storage go from [...]

Yes, but the point is that there will always be a requirement to manage and persist the data you are working on somehow, and how you go about this somehow dramatically impacts (or should impact) the choices you make at the more abstract level of data structures. It is a fundamental concept that you will be forced to consider in one way or the other. You can have the fastest algo in the world crunching huge amounts of data, but if you then take an inordinate amount of time to store and retrieve results, it's as bad as having blazing-fast storage and crappy algos.

> I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID

I agree that is traditionally considered a subclass of I/O, but I think in recent years we have seen that it's much more important than previously understood. Good software with mediocre UI is ignored while mediocre software with good UI can change the world. This is one of the few real discoveries in our field since the '80s.

>> power management, booting

> Two things which have changed quite a bit

... but are still there in some shape or form, and will forever be there. They are changing the world because people put effort and thought into them as fundamental parts of computing experiences, not one-offs that can be simply ignored as "constant time".

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#163

Post by ManlyBread »

toyg wrote: post #146
Spooky23 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the age of 4.3 GB drives that cost $750, unlikely.

It was also the age of the average file being 20kb though. You could have provided 50mb per user and the world would have gone "woah".

I remember how amazing it was when the email accounts went from 20mb max size to something like 500mb, it blew my mind and gave rise to many services that capitalized on this huge amount of space (mostly peer-to-mail and an application that turned gmail accounts into a dropbox kind of thing).

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#164

Post by i336_ »

agumonkey wrote: post #158
i336_ wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm in a minimalist passeist phase. > ...one to one with that simple machine. Recommendation: Forth (cf. colorForth) Warning: Save snapshot of current mental state/perspective/worldview first, to guarantee sustained mental health :P

I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|*)Forth webpages. Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

> I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|)Forth webpages.

I occasionally do too :P

> Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

I know the feeling... but I'm still at the "Lisp looks like parenthetical line noise, and what even is* ML?" stage, so I haven't yet tackled those.

Forth, to me, seems to be bring out the "mechanicalness" of the computer, in a weird sort of way. Of course it's just another programming language, but the philosophy and mentality behind it seems to lean in that direction. I like it for that, and its minimalism. :D

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#165

Post by agumonkey »

i336_ wrote: post #164
agumonkey wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color|*)Forth webpages. Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it.

> I regularly scan (ansi|gnu|color| )Forth webpages. I occasionally do too :P > Thinking Forth is on my mental shelf for so long. ML and Lisps keep delaying reading it. I know the feeling... but I'm still at the "Lisp looks like parenthetical line noise, and what even is* ML?" stage, so I haven't yet tackled those. Forth, to me, seems to be bring out the "mechanicalness" of the computer, in a weird sort of way. Of co…

I love lisp and ml to bits, it's more that there's a whole cosmos to learn from there (type systems, macros, logic resolution, you name it).

I kinda understand the mechanicalness of Forth, if you mean that there's only a few principles and that even 'syntax' is built on that. The kind of less is more that frees your mind

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#168

Post by mynameisvlad »

drewcrawford wrote: post #137
normac wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they're the most notorious about being slow, even as their hardware performance approaches what PCs were like just a few years ago. Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything fro…

> Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything from the Win98 era, e.g. iTunes until a couple of years ago. By contrast, the cheapest Third World market smartphone would run Win98 apps blinding fast. It is easy to take potshots at e.g. iTunes, but the real reason software "got worse" is not developers getting lazy. What happened is that expectations for CPU-intensive features…

Willingness to pay didn't vanish, it's just that how we pay has changed. No, we don't pay for iTunes, but iTunes is the entry point to the iTunes store, so there's plenty of revenue coming in through that. And while iTunes and OSX are free, the hardware that OSX runs on makes up for that by being more expensive.

Re: Show HN: Windows 98 in browser

#169

Post by mynameisvlad »

rphlx wrote: post #138
normac wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean to compare native mobile apps to web apps (though I see now how it could be read that way). I'm talking about native software in general. I chose smartphones for the comparison because they're the most notorious about being slow, even as their hardware performance approaches what PCs were like just a few years ago. Although even some desktop apps manage to be as janky and dog slow as almost anything fro…

It's getting better (particularly on high-end phones) but single-threaded performance is still nowhere near circa-2013 desktop x86_64 (3.5ghz+ haswell). And it'll probably never catch up due to the thermal and battery life constraints.

"Never" is a very dangerous word to use considering that just 70 years ago, the ENIAC was created and that about 20 years ago, we were using Pentiums with 150-200MHz. The fact that we've come such a long way in such a short time means we probably have quite a ways to go, too.
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